Atlassian is on The Startup Bus

Every day I get in the queue (Too much, the Magic Bus)
To get on the bus that takes me to you (Too much, the Magic Bus)

– The Who, Magic BusOn March 9th, the Startup Bus, brainchild of Elias Bizannes, embarks on a 48-hour journey to SXSW. A few dozen entrepreneurs will meet each other on the bus (many for the first time) and together this ragtag crew will attempt to build 3 standalone technology startups from scratch. Their crazy goal is to arrive at a party at SXSW where they sell their startup ideas to investors and the press.
Along the journey from San Francisco to Austin, the developers will be using JIRA Studio, our hosted software development suite, to code, document, and track their projects. We’re happy to be sponsors of the Startup Bus, and we’re happy that our own Mark Halvorson, software engineer and “Imagineer,” will be one of the twelve on the bus.
It won’t come as any surprise that we’re stoked to power the Bus. We love supporting startups, maybe because we still think of ourselves as a startup, an outsider in the enterprise software world. Yeah, we know that market forces are pointing in our direction — transparency, low cost, easy set-up — and that lots of other companies have sprung up to challenge us with equally radical notions of how enterprise B2B should look, but in some ways we consider our 8 year-old business as an experiment in progress.
JIRA Studio is primarily used by startups and small teams that want to get down to brass tax and start coding without having to bother with the fuss and muss of server management and upgrades. The latest version of JIRA Studio included our continuous integration server, Bamboo, which itself leverages another cloud-based app, Amazon Web Services.
On Monday, March 8, you can find many of us at the send-off party for the Startup Bus, powered by Atlassian and other sponsors like the eStrategy Group (who will be mentoring the teams). Starting Tuesday you can follow the Startup Bus as it motors into the startup history book.